Stories

“You don’t look like an Ishmael,” he said, an eyebrow arching. But it was a costume party. She could be anything in there.

She laughed, throwing her head back and revealing the hollow of her neck. She looked very thin, he thought. “I guess not,” she said, “but I’ve always wanted to say that when someone asked my name.”

“Ishmael it is,” he said. “You better call me Isaac, then.” His seventies afro shortened while his moustache grew, and the loud disco suit he’d been wearing morphed into a ship’s dress whites. A martini shaker appeared on the table next to him and he gave her the pistol-finger.

“Very clever,” she said, shaking her head in what he imagined was admiration. He mentally made a list of all his friends who liked — or at least had an awareness of— cheesy old television. “But isn’t that cheating?”

“You’re the first person I’ve talked to tonight,” he said, “no one else saw the other outfit. Besides, this one’s better.” He tugged the jacket down and grinned. “So, Ishmael.” He sipped from the red plastic cup in his hand. “You appear to have me at a disadvantage.”

“Oh?”

“You’ve got me figured out, but I can’t tell who you are supposed to be.” He took in her utterly generic jeans and pale blue t-shirt adorned with a line drawing of a sparrow.

She leaned in toward him and looked around as if fearful that the other partygoers might overhear. “I’m the Empress of the Universe.”

“I see,” he said. “I must say, you look almost as much like the Empress of the Universe as you look like an Ishmael.”

She grinned. “I’m in disguise.”

He barked out a laugh, spilling his drink in the process. He grabbed a nearby napkin and dabbed at her arm, revelling as always in the simulacrum of touch. It wasn’t exactly right, he remembered that well enough. But it was so close.

He was disappointed when she took the napkin from him to finish cleaning herself up. “In disguise,” he said. “Very good. You might even win with that one.”

“I was working at this stim joint, a place called Ultra-Sissons. It’s not where I’m working now — I wasn’t a bartender then, just a busser. Cleaning up the used cartridges, tidying chairs, occasionally tossing out the odd rowdy. Anyway, I wasn’t important or anything, it was just an entry level job. Nothing special.

“This doesn’t even have to do with me, though. It was one of the regulars. Guy who called himself Johnny Burling. I don’t know if that was his real name or what, but that didn’t matter much. We never cared about that kind of thing too much at Ultra. Johnny was a regular — in most every night. He wasn’t one of the troublemakers; you know the kind I mean: those folks who shoot cartridges all night until they can’t even piss straight, and you have to slip them a sobriety™ round at closing time just to get them out the door. Every stim place I’ve seen has those kind of regulars. I guess they pay the bills.

“But that’s not Johnny. He was strictly a Red Zinger man — it was always the same for him. Two Red Zingers over the course of a few hours, and by the time he was starting his second he was off in his own little world. He told me once that he was creating a cooperative narrative, if you can believe it. He’d come in, take his hits of focus™ and creativity™ and zone out. He’d spend the next three hours busy working away in his onboard system – eyes all unfocussed but zipping back and forth, like he’s dreaming or something, you know? I guess he got a lot of work done that way.

“He was plenty friendly, though, before the stims really got into him. Liked to talk to the other chatty cathies in the joint, and talked to me plenty, too. Bussing was a pretty boring job, and to tell the truth most of the other regulars were no fun, so talking to Johnny was often as good as it got. He was a funny guy.

“Anyway, the point is that I liked him. He was nice — harmless, you know? Never did anything mean to anyone. He just didn’t deserve what happened.”

It wasn’t the first time Grey had heard the tell-tale bang… whoosh of a pot of chemicals self-igniting, but they weren’t running such a half-assed operation that it happened often. He dropped the stim cart he’d been filling, the small vial bouncing off the table, its window breaking on impact and the half measure of bright green liquid spilling out. He didn’t even stop to see what happened to the bulb he’d been using to fill the cart — who cared about a few euros worth of stims when there was a fireball in the next room.

Grey fought the entirely natural impulse to just get the hell out of there. It was a crummy little squat they’d moved into a couple of weeks previously, and there was a way out on to the back alley from the hallway off the room he was in. But Ev was in the kitchen on the other side of the doorway. The doorway, which was now glowing with a sickly orange light.

He ran to the door and yelled, “Ev! Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she croaked, like she was choking on fumes, which made sense because the stuff she was cooking in there was notorious for giving off noxious gasses when it burned. “Fire’s almost out.”

“Get out of there,” he hollered, then took a deep breath of the relatively fresh air. Holding his breath, he pulled the neck of his shirt up over his nose and barged into the kitchen.

Ev was standing over the stove, holding a heavy blanket over the pot. It was hot as hell in the little kitchen, but it was just as warm out in the other room. There was no ventilation in this squat and the weather had been muggy for days. Grey looked around quickly and took stock of the situation.

There were trails of flame on the floor, and Grey’s eyes could feel something nasty in the air, but there was no inferno and Ev seemed to be in one piece. He stamped out the few bits of burning liquid on the ground and peeked under the blanket to make sure the fire in the pot was out. It all seemed okay, so he grabbed Ev’s hand. “Come on,” Grey grunted and pulled her out of the room. It was probably only about ten seconds since he’d heard the bang before they were out in the alley, sucking in the warm, thick air and coughing up their lungs.

“What happened?” Grey asked, once he felt like he could almost breathe properly again.

Ev just shook her head and Grey could see her struggling for breath. He cleared some of the junk from beside the wall and made a place for her to sit. He took her hand, which any other day would have made his heart race and his face turn the colour of their newest mix, Heartfire. Today, though, all he could think was that it should have been him in there.

He helped her sit down and she put her head between her knees. Grey sunk down next to her, and mimicked her posture. It wasn’t because he felt faint, but because he knew that if he’d been the one cooking the stuff it wouldn’t have happened. Ultimately, he knew, this was his fault.

The wet, painful sounds of Ev puking distracted him from his self-pity and he put a hand on her back. He could see that she’d singed her eyebrows and there was a streak of neon green on her face, but being sick was a good sign. She’d be okay. This time.

I was balancing a cup of tea in one hand, while hanging on to the side of the companionway hatch with the other. I climbed into the cockpit sideways, compensating for the roll of the boat. I was only four days out of port and still getting used to the syncopated back and forth as Lucky Lady took the waves abeam.

I got myself safely to my seat by the helm and took a sip of tea. I sighed, hooked my tether to the harness I always wore above decks, and leaned back over the rail. The sky was clear and full of stars in that complete way that only happens on a moonless night hundreds of miles from shore. I hadn’t seen another vessel in days and that was just fine. Nothing to run into, nothing to worry about. Just me, my boat, the big blue below and the big black above.

I did a 360° scan of the horizon, just in case, and seeing nothing, set the timer for twenty minutes. I lay down on the soft cockpit cushions and closed my eyes. I had a rig that would steer the boat to the wind for me, and I knew that nothing should be able to make it from beyond the horizon to my position in less than twenty minutes. Even so, I had the radar set to sound an alarm if anything showed up within ten miles. I dropped off to sleep in the rocking of the waves.

The timer went off, and I drowsily opened my eyes. I sat up, and looked around. Still nothing. I smiled to myself and took a sip of tea, still warm in its thermal cup. I checked the instruments — with twelve knots of wind on the beam, we were rocketing along at six knots; pretty good for my heavy old thirty-four footer. I leaned back out to look at the stars again, and squinted. I’m no celestial nav expert, but I’ve spent enough time looking up to notice when there’s something new. Occasionally, I’ll notice a new satellite or something up there. But I’d never seen anything new that was this bright before. Or moving so fast.

#

The radar told me that the thing landed about eight miles away, and I thought I could even hear the splash. I certainly saw the flash of light falling from the sky into the sea. Was it a meteorite? I guess that must happen sometimes, and the odds were that at least some of those times someone would be out and about and be able to see it. Still, I didn’t think there were any meteor showers predicted for this area, and I hadn’t seen any other shooting stars all night. And it really didn’t look like any meteor I’d ever seen before. I was sure I’d seen lights on the thing.

You don’t keep much of a tight schedule travelling on a sailboat, so a detour wasn’t going to hurt me any. I disconnected the self steering, and swung the wheel to starboard. I eased the sheets, and soon was surfing the little waves bearing straight toward the radar target that still glowed bright green on my screen.

An hour and half later the predawn light was starting to peek up over the horizon and I was close enough to see the debris. There were a couple of still-blinking white lights among the wreckage, and I thought I could see a glint of metal in the early morning light. I got out my binoculars, and braced myself to try and get a clear view of it while Lucky Lady pitched and rolled beneath me. It was hard to get a good view, but I thought I could make out some kind of yellow lettering on the largest piece floating on the waves. I put the binocs down, and paid close attention to my course. I didn’t want to drive right through the stuff, but I wanted to be able to get close enough to see it better.

I tried to steer myself slightly upwind of the debris, and when I was already too close for comfort, I threw the wheel hard over to port. I hauled on the mainsheet, then cranked in the jib. As the main came around, the Lady bobbed up like a cork and slowed. I tied off the wheel once I was sure we were well hove to and then clipped my leash to the jacklines running fore and aft on the topsides. The sun was rising in earnest now, and I could see the debris pretty clearly, floating about a football field away downwind.

There were three or four distinct parts floating on the surface, and I suspected a fair amount of the thing had sunk already. I could read some of the lettering on the largest piece now: MA R M. This was no meteor.

“Pupusas?” The woman’s nasal voice reached Randall at the back of the bus before he saw her pushing her way down the aisle. He could smell the warm, raw meat smell of his own sweaty body, and his stomached wriggled. He was hungry, but he couldn’t face mysterious little bits of meat.

“Quiere pupusas?” the voice called again, and Randall saw the plump figure with her plastic tub approach his seat.

“Frijol?” he asked, his high school Spanish failing him for a full sentence.

“Sí,” the woman answered. “Frijol y queso.”

“Dos, por favor,” Randall said, and fished in his pocket for a crumpled bill. The woman passed him a paper envelope of warm dough that smelled pleasantly of mild spice and cheese, and he gave her the money. She dug into the frilly, ribboned apron she wore over her cheap nylon shorts and gave him a handful of change.

“Pupusas?” she continued to hector the remaining passengers on the bus, before exiting from the back doors just as the bus lurched away.

Randall ate his warm snack carefully, grateful that they were not so hot as to leak runny beans and cheese all over himself. The corn flour dough was barely warm to the touch, but the filling was good and his stomach momentarily stopped its gurgling. Randall had been riding the garishly painted repurposed school bus for about an hour, heading south, heading away from what anywhere he thought of as civilization. His pupusas gone, Randall leaned his head against the metal side of the bus, and tried to relax.

#

Brian Randall was a name that wasn’t famous in the way a screen actor’s name might be famous, but he had several thousand online followers, and he couldn’t go to a conference or industry party without a dozen or more fans tagging along after him. He was the first to admit that he loved the attention. He’d enjoyed a good success with several of his online ventures, and the following was one of the perks of this success. Of course, the money was a strong motivator, too. But Randall would have developed cute little gadgets and toys for the online market even if people hadn’t been willing to pay his way. Indeed, he spent the first several years of his career working out of a dumpy apartment in the Bay area, with a pair of equally bookish roommates, coding day and night for the sheer thrill of it. Brian Randall was a natural.

He first struck it big with a tool he called the “all in one reader”. Once he sold it to Google, their marketing people rebranded it Google Summary. It really was ingenious: you could feed the service any kind of file, and it would output a shockingly sensible summary of it. It was not terribly revolutionary for text files, but it worked just as well on audio or video. And much more interesting for the development set, you could upload a piece of code in any of the popular languages, and it would give a text description of what the code would do. What it did with images was much less useful, but absolutely fascinating. Randall had made certain that the output on image files was always exactly one thousand words.

Randall could have lived easily on the sum he earned from the sale of the product, but he still had more ideas. He moved out of the cramped apartment, got a fancy set of digs of his own, and started noodling. After the Summary sale, he was asked to speak at one of the major tech conferences in the Bay Area, and there he got his first taste of fame. He had only just arrived at the exposition hall, and was picking up his conference package, when a tall, attractive young man approached him.

“Are you Brian Randall,” the man asked, a shy smile on his face.

“Yes,” Randall said, wondering if there had been a problem with his registration or something.

“The Brian Randall,” the man continued, “of the all in one reader?”

Randall smiled to hear his own name for the technology. “That’s me,” he said. “You can just call me Randall.”

“Wow,” the other man gushed. “I’m such a fan of your work. My name is Chick Hernandez.” He stuck out his hand, and Randall shook it. “Can I interview you for my blog?”

Randall laughed, and said, “Sure, why not?” They exchanged email addresses and IM handles, and met that night for a beer after dinner. Chick blogged between rounds. After Randall’s talk the next day, Chick Hernandez was the envy of all the major tech bloggers for the scoop. Randall left the conference with at least fifty more entries in his contact list.

Carly moaned softly in her sleep, and rolled over. She dreamed and dreamed, and when she woke, she found that she still had the lingering shadow of a smile on her lips. Her body was loose with the remnants of her orgasm. She stretched, and smiled fully as her eyes slowly opened. She loved Mondays.

there was a man
so beautiful
he took the breath from my body
we were drawn to each other
as if we had magnets
in our souls

Carly walked into the dream research lab a few minutes early, but Dave was already there. His back was turned to her, but she knew his body by heart. Dave Windeman, M.D., PhD. had been Dr. Carly Andrews’ partner in research for nearly four years, but not, alas, in life. From the first day they worked together it was clear that they were the perfect pair in the lab, complementing each others’ weaknesses, feeding their strengths. They were so obviously well-suited to each other, their grad students never understood why they weren’t a couple off campus.

It was not a question they had never secretly asked themselves.

As she watched Dave lean against his desk and read a report, Carly felt an involuntary flush come to her face as she vividly remembered her dream from the previous night.

our mouths touched
and sparks flew from our parted lips

Carly sighed softly, and walked toward her partner. Dave stood, sensing her behind him and turned. He smiled, and Carly saw the corners of his eyes crinkle. “Morning, Doctor,” he said. “You slept well, I trust.” He raised one eyebrow, and Carly felt herself blushing again.

“Indeed,” Dave said. “It was another impressive showing from our friends last night.” He leaned back against the lab bench, and took a sip from his coffee cup. “It was the Swedish women’s soccer team for me,” he grinned with false machismo. “Anyone interesting for you?”

I never planned to end up here. I’ve never planned anything, really. All my life has been like that: I see an opportunity and I take it. Sometimes that works out better than other times. So why should this be any different?

I’d just been by docking station three, slipping a few hundred wadded euros off the shifty captain from that rust bucket Lunacy. What a stupid name for a cargo ship. Why do ships’ captains feel compelled to name their barges with some clever pun, anyway? Lunacy, indeed.

About a month before, I’d caught them dumping their trash out their airlock after their last trip off the base. They thought they were far enough off the rock that no one would see, but I just happened to be ogling a brand new BMW private shuttle through the scope when I saw them do it. If I’d followed procedure and called it into the ILSOC, the International Lunar Station Oversight Committee would have slapped that scow with a fine that made the wad I’d stuffed in my own pocket look like milk money. And the dark circles under the captain’s eyes I’d seen the last few times they dropped their cargo off made me guess that he didn’t have the kind of dough to cover a fine like that. The cash in my pants told me I’d guessed right.

He’d been paying me off every time they came through here to keep my trap shut so they could just open theirs and avoid the dumping fees back Earthside. It was typical for that kind of operation – an old junker repurposed for cargo transport to try and get in on the lunar cash cow. I’d been inside Lunacy a couple of times when I was making nice with a sweet young thing who’d been working on board for a while. It was amazing their shipments didn’t grow legs, the security on board that boat was so bad. No one ever noticed me, though. It seemed like anyone could come and go as they pleased, and for a few nights, I was very well pleased, indeed.

I was off to my quarters to add these recently acquired bills to the little stash I had going, when my beeper went off. I jumped at the noise, and pulled the little phone from my other pocket. I could see on its display that it was a call from my boss, Laura. I was technically off duty, but I answered the call.

“Natalie?” A voice that was definitely not Laura’s boomed through the tiny speaker. I thumbed the volume down a bit.

“Yes,” I said, warily. “Who is this?”

“This is Jerry Cornwell speaking,” the voice said. Oh, shit, I thought. Jerry Cornwell was Laura’s boss. I’d never even seen the guy. “Could you pop by Ms. Baine’s office please?” His voice made it clear that it was not a question.

I gulped nervously to myself. “Sure,” I said aloud, turning away from the habitat section of the converted old mining station and toward the management offices for the resort. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

I slip into the fake-leather seat, and look at my watch. I have about an hour before the shareholders’ meeting, but I have to stop by the day care first, so I want to make this snappy. I’ve found that the little impatient look usually stops these people from making small talk and gets them down to business. Not this guy, though. From the moment I sit down, he starts with the chit chat. I sigh softly to myself, not wanting to be rude, and look up at the mirror that lets me see a little of his face. That’s when I notice that he’s not from here. I can hear it in the accent, and when I look closely I can see that his eyes reflected in the mirror look a little… off. Great. Just what I need. Another bloody foreigner.

Still, I’m not prejudiced, so I give the man my particulars and he gets going. I know it’s probably going to take at least twenty minutes, so I lean back, close my eyes and hope I can maybe just sleep through it.

No such luck. He’s chattering away at me, about the weather and some boring local political thing, when he looks up at the mirror at the same time I glance up and our eyes meet. “You might not realize this,” he says to me, “but I’m an immigrant.”

“You don’t say,” I answer, bored and rolling my eyes, though he can’t see me anymore, his focus back on his job where it belongs.

“It’s true,” he says, not noticing my sarcasm. “I have a home here now, but I came through the portal about a year and a half ago. You ever been through?” he asked, his eyes darting up to the mirror and catching my gaze.

I fake a smile and shake my head. “No,” I say.

He laughs mirthlessly. “Well, you probably would not want to. Oh, my plane is a beautiful place. We have these amazing snow-capped mountains there that you just don’t have here, and the architecture cannot be believed.” He pauses a moment, and I worry that I’m going to get the tourism board lecture. Instead, he mercifully goes back to his story. “I’m sure the other planes are lovely, too. But the trip – Gott in Himmel – it’s a bear. I truly thought I was going to die. It was like my flesh was being ripped off my bones. Yeugh.” He shivers at the memory.

Of course, I’ve heard all about the terrible pain of the interdimensional transporters. They say that the scientists who accidentally created the first rift between one instance of the universe and the others only realized they had done anything remarkable at all when they heard the agonized shrieking of the poor bastard who fell in the hole. Not something that sounds much like a holiday to me. I always said I’d wait until they figured out some painless way to travel between the planes, thank you very much. Besides, I never really understood what was so great about being surrounded by a bunch of foreign freaks in the first place. It’s not like you even have to travel for that.

Jo-Lynn had always laughed at Charlotte, her stupid sister-in-law, who believed the crap in those so-called newspapers she bought at the supermarket every week. It was no wonder that her no-good brother married Charlotte; he’d always liked them dumb and easy.

Once Charlotte moved in to the small house Jo-Lynn had been sharing with her brother Carl since their parents died, Jo-Lynn had decided it was time to move. She just didn’t have an excuse to go to the city, and she wasn’t about to move away then have to come crawling back when she ran out of money. She needed a plan.

She’d been out on the back porch having a cigarette when she saw the light in the sky, squinting as the saucer landed. She was plenty surprised when the aliens grabbed her and she found out that Charlotte’s trashy papers weren’t entirely full of garbage.

Carl hated that Jo-Lynn finished high school with honours, hated her even more for wanting to go to the city and attend the community college. “What do you want to be groping rich old ladies for?” he asked, sneering, between sips of Pabst Blue Ribbon, when Jo-Lynn told him she was moving to the city to become a massage therapist. “As if some fancy college makes you better than me,” he slurred, as Jo-Lynn left the room to pack.

She figured the aliens were trying to probe her that night on the table on their ship, but being one-celled organisms, they didn’t know how to do it. They just poked and prodded with their pseudopodia, all night long. But by the time they finally dumped her back in the yard, Jo-Lynn had come up with a plan. Those aliens gave a damn good massage.

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Accustomed to being an only child, adoptee Brian “Gumbo” Guillemot’s teenage hobby was searching for his birth parents. After years without a lead, when he finally finds his birth mother, Kim, he’s unprepared for the boisterous instant family that comes with her.

No one, besides Kim, knows anything about Gumbo’s birth father. With Kim refusing to answer any questions, Gumbo must choose whether to continue the search, even if it means alienating his few friends and both his families. And the more he learns, the more he wonders whether some things are better left unknown.

Captivating and playful, The Home For Wayward Parrots explores friendship, romance, modern families and geek pop culture with wit, compassion and extremely foul-mouthed birds.